It opens up problems to entirely new answers that the asker would never have contemplated before.

NPR does a nice overview of one of our favorite topics, using the web for open collaboration, or "crowdsourcing" in a piece by Margot Adler called "Businesses Harness Power of the Crowd".

They talk about some cool projects like the design of a new NASA space glove, to Threadless, t-shirt design contests (grown to an 80,000 shirts a month business!)

They talk with with some smart people on the topic, like Clay Shirkey, who says crowdsourcing eliminates the need for a large organization and central management to solve problems - instead using the web to enable work by groups of dispersed individuals.

They also review Innocentive (see my previous post) - which pairs seekers with solvers. They say that Innocentive now has 120,000 registered researchers from 170 countries prizes. Prizes range from few $1,000s to $100,000s - even up to $1 million. They report that about 1/3 of challenges have been answered successfully.

Great quote from poverty-focused expert at the Rockefeller Foundation - Maria Blair - who said that crowdsourcing has no bias towards prior expertise and that it "opens up problems to entirely new answers that the asker would never have contemplated before."

Technorati tags:
Crowdsourcing
Innocentive
Rockefeller
NPR

Our friends at the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration just finished running a great contest on YouTube called the MPA/MPP YouTube Public Policy Challenge. Yours truely got to be one of the, um, celebrity judges, and have a lot of fun viewing all the entries and helping select a winner.

Scott Talan and the folks at NASPAA hatched the contest for a couple of reasons - including to challenge Masters of Public Affairs / Masters of Public Policy students to experiment with the format of online video to communicate effectively important public policy issues. Scott says that for the next generation of MPA/MPP graduates to be effective in promotion solutions to policy problems they'll need to do more than just develop great idea and write compelling policy memos. They will also need to be able to communicate about the the problems and solutions effectively online - in order to reach widespread audiences and to build support.

I think the contest by NASPAA is also a great example of an organization using a collaborative online contest to raise awareness of its issues and its work. And any contest that leads to the creation of submissions that are web-ready content - like YouTube videos - is going to get a lot of exposure.

This is the first time they ran the contest, and they received 17 video entries covering a wide range of policy issues -- wrongful conviction, agriculture subsidies, literacy, infant abandonment, HIV/AIDs prevention, terrorism, and others. The entries came from MPA/MPP schools around the country - George Mason University, Seattle University, Midwestern State University - Texas, and others. Surprised to not see any from my alma mater, the Kennedy School?!

The winning entry by Jon Hickey, of the Evans School of Public Affairs - University of Washington, is called Crossing Lines: Immigration Reform in America. He used a witty and sparse illustration style, and a low-key voiceover to raise some provocative questions about immigration policy. His entry is both fun to watch and effective at raising interest in the policy issue - I really like it.

Another interesting aspect of the contest is the support NASPAA had from YouTube's "Citizen Tube" channel and its editor Steve Grove , himself an MPA/MPP graduate. This got me introduce to CitizenTube and I'll be watching it as the '08 election approaches - some innovative things happening there!

Technorati tags:
NASPAA
CitizenTube
YouTube